With the rapid growth in the number of new media platforms in China, a large number of Internet users have been turned into citizen journalism accounts. With the digital transformation of official media, many citizen journalism accounts are often pulled into news production by official media to co-produce content. On the Chinese Internet, citizen journalism not only plays the role of challenging and influencing agenda-setting and public opinion, but also takes on the task of propagating ideology and values. This thesis explored this phenomenon of journalistic practice by using generic news frames and propaganda theories as theoretical foundations. Meanwhile, this study used mainly quantitative content analysis as research method, exploring the characteristics of news videos produced by Chinese citizen journalism accounts in collaboration with official media, and what propaganda techniques were used to help legitimize authoritarian rule. This study examined 432 collaborative videos on bilibili published by CCTV between 2020 and 2023. The findings suggest that collaborative videos tend to produce soft news with positive human interest and morality frames, while negative news mainly targets foreign countries' conflicts. Furthermore, collaborative videos mainly use soft propaganda and public opinion guidance to disseminate values and ideologies that are in line with the national interest and lead the audience to support the CPC and the government's political governance, which legitimizes authoritarian rule. These results illustrate how Chinese citizen journalism in the propaganda field contributes to the propaganda strategy of the party and the government, how it has been used to legitimize authoritarian rule, and why its characteristics are significantly different from those of the Western scholars.

Sun Yat-sen used six propaganda techniques in the United States to help overthrow the Ching Dynasty in 1911: (a) individual propaganda to gain supporters through personal contact and individual persuasion; (b) propaganda of deed to solicit donations and to mobilize his supporters for military actions; (c) travel propaganda to broaden the base of revolutionary support; (d) newspaper propaganda to publicize and explain his revolutionary program; (e) debate propaganda to refute antirevolutionary criticism through speeches and pamphlets; and (f) missionary propaganda to seek sympathy and support from American missionaries and Christians.

The thesis investigates propaganda in the online news coverage about the media law proposal Lex TVN, committed to the Polish parliament in 2021. The mixed methods approach applied in the research is based on a novel analytical matrix combining the Propaganda Model theory (Herman & Chomsky, 1988) and modalities of propaganda techniques (Da San Martino et al., 2020). The main findings indicate that propaganda in the coverage about the Lex TVN is a cross-platform issue; that it occured in different forms, as: sources, critical content (flak) or expressions of ideological preferences; and that it was created using various propaganda techniques. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that propaganda was used for several reasons: to attract attention of the readers; to increase the firm’s profit and popularity; to express the stance of the media brand towards the bill Lex TVN; and to criticize the current government. The study contributes to the field of Media and Communication Studies by using the novel analytical matrix that tests the applicability of the PM in a new geopolitical context, Poland, and adds to the academically unexplored research area of news propaganda in Polish media. Several topics for further studies are suggested: the analysis of propaganda in the news coverage published by the Polish state media brand TVPInfo; an investigation of the news reception in Poland and the ability of the Polish news readers to identify news propaganda; and lastly, studying potential positive effects of news propaganda in the Polish context.